Su-27B Ukrainian Air Force, Bort no.58, RIAT 2018
Comments
Really nice work on the paint work. A lovely looking model, very well done. Slava Ukraini
Beautiful build & bird. Congratulations 👍 SLAVA UKRAINE 🇺🇦💪 SLAVA Major Oleksandr Oksanchenko. Героям Слава!
What a beautiful job, it certainly deserves more pictures 🙂
And WIP pictures please 😉
Thank you all for your compliments! I will get one day around to take some more pictures of it, with a proper background and lighting...right now I don't really have a good setup and this bird is huuuge 🙂
Album info
I was fortunate enough to see this very aircraft in RIAT 2018. The pilot, Major Oleksandr Oksanchenko, made a series of displays that, for me, were among the highlights of the event. Even the arrival was awesome, both this A/C and a two seater came flying in formation with its supporting Il-76.
This aircraft was reported to be shot down during the opening days of the infamous russian invasion of Ukraine while being flown by Oleksandr. He died that day, onboard his Flanker, defending his home.
I completed it on January 2022. By then I didn't expect that it would become a symbol of a tragedy in addition to a memento of happy days dancing in the skies.
I used AKAN paints (lacquer ones) which were quite good. I had some trouble with Foxbot's vinyl masks. They stuck sometimes too hard but nevertheless were really good. I had to improvise some adaptations because the set I used was the one intended for the twin seater, and the humb is quite different.
This kit is actually recicled. I built it the first time twenty years ago. Used a Pavla cockpit on it and that was all, the rest was from the box. I painted it that first time as in the scheme from the box (the one with the big shark on its side). I came to dislike it because of the Academy canopy, which is way too shallow and ruins the outline of the kit. I dipped it in caustic soda, took it apart, and rebuilt it flying. Now it looks properly like a Flanker 🙂
Apart from adding aftermarket radome, canopy, antennaes, cockpit and a figure of Oleksander in the cockpit, I modified the auxiliary air intakes of the lower sides of the intakes. The individual louvres for the intakes move individually on the real aircraft, and thus when it overflew us at low speeds you could actually see them (sometimes, depending on flight conditions) opening and closing individually. It was like seeing the aircraft breathe and I tried to replicate that on the model.